


Good Moments To Keep

by 9_of_Clubs



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Bucky Shuri BFFs, Bucky in Wakanda, Bucky learning how to live again, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Goats and Sundaes and Selfies, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Recovery, Shuri Is a Good Bro, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, T'Challa is the best, The Golden Wakanda Days, hints at Bucky's trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-24 19:35:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22323286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/9_of_Clubs/pseuds/9_of_Clubs
Summary: Between one war and another.--"They make dinner together and watch the stars, and he thinks idly that maybe she is lonely too, thinks in passing as the expanse of sky opens around him, and he can expand his breaths as far as he wants, can stretch his body across the land, and stretch and stretch and stretch, no barriers or walls or chains around his wrists, thinks idly of a sister he can barely remember, of chilly fall nights on a fire escape squinting to see even a glimpse of the universe, the slight fear it would be too cold and Steve would get sick, the slight thrill, at being so daring. He thinks about the way they sat, shoulders brushing, and the way everything else seemed to vanish."
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Shuri, James "Bucky" Barnes & T'Challa, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 1
Kudos: 43





	Good Moments To Keep

He has woken up to many things, ugly things, mostly, orders and sneers, the promise of blood, or pain, or callous hands on skin, he has woken to confusion and fear and the scraping suffocation of despair, but this time the world is quiet.   
  
Narrowed to a set of peering curious eyes on a face connected to a body that leans over him, _he has woken to curious eyes before_ , to a person in his space, but there is no malice here.  
  
“Good morning, Sergeant Barnes.”  
  
Her voice is confident, pleased, he’s awoken to _pleased_ before, but there’s no curve of hunger beneath the words, and a smile emerges from the depths of the unfamiliar face, thrumming with light, a pleasant radiance, reigned in for this moment, but leaping around the edges, like the fractures of sunrise on the waves.  
  
In a way, perhaps, he was born again there, in that moment, in a way perhaps, that explains how it went next. A kind of imprinting that befits more creature than human, a creature in a world of ice when it sees flame.   
  
He blinks at her, for a breath wonders if he’s awake at all, the softness beneath his body, aching, _he’s woken to an aching body before_ , registering somewhere, the way his skin is clean.   
  
Maybe he smiles back.  
  
Darkness floods across his mind.  
  
—  
  
“I have healed you, of course.”  
  
She announces cheerily when he is aware enough to ask why he’s awake.  
  
“It was simple...” Her sunlit smile fades down, falters for a moment which he traces with his eyes. “There was just a delay, a bit of-“ Her lips quirk, but the joy has faded a notch around them. “A family quarrel.” Shuri inhales, holds the truth that lies in unsaid breaths a moment, and then lets go the pain with the air in her body, her chin tilts up, her shoulders square, happiness comes licking back along her.   
  
He watches and wishes he could forget too, with a movement of lung, if only for a moment.   
  
“It is settled now.”  
  
And then she has coaxed the conversation towards other things, and he doesn’t try to stop her.   
  
It’s something to be protected, he thinks, to be able to let the pain fade away.  
  
—  
  
He doesn’t ask about Steve, but he thinks about him.  
  
About waking without him, which he’s always done, but hoped - maybe this time... maybe. Maybe, next time.   
  
Shuri catches him one day as he wonders silently, but too loud, the only emotions that his body can manufacture too crude to disguise, a far off look in his eye and her grin is searching, then sly. A careful hand on his arm.   
  
Touch still presents in such confusion, a prickle of goosebumps on skin, an aching hope and a stutter of his heart and breath, there is terror in touch, still, and maybe, somewhere, the promise of peace.  
  
She has seen all his memories, he thinks idly, and there is an unbearable comfort in that.   
  
The hand is gone again before he can blink.  
  
“Shall we call him, then?”   
  
There are a thousand watts on her face, and something suddenly young, eager, anticipation of delicious mayhem.  
  
Shuri is trouble, Bucky thinks, but for once, trouble is on his side.  
  
—  
  
She sleeps in a cot in his hut some nights when she visits.  
  
_Because it is too late._ She levels at him with a grin. _The journey is too long_.  
  
He does not have to be a Wakandan genius to know that that is a lie for anyone in this country, especially for its princess.  
  
But there’s something comforting to another set of breaths in the stillness of jungle night, another soul alive to remind him this won’t fade with the closing of his eyes.   
  
Company is not an experience that he has lived in the last century, only solitude of every kind.  
  
They make dinner together and watch the stars, and he thinks idly that maybe she is lonely too, thinks in passing as the expanse of sky opens around him, and he can expand his breaths as far as he wants, can stretch his body across the land, and stretch and stretch and stretch, no barriers or walls or chains around his wrists, thinks idly of a sister he can barely remember, of chilly fall nights on a fire escape squinting to see even a glimpse of the universe, the slight fear it would be too cold and Steve would get sick, the slight thrill, at being so daring. He thinks about the way they sat, shoulders brushing, and the way everything else seemed to vanish.  
  
It belongs to him, he tries out the thought, but there’s no certainty behind it.  
  
“Where have you wandered?”  
  
Her eyes are bright in the dancing flames they lit.  
  
So he tells her. Tries to wrap his fingers around it with sound.  
  
—  
  
It is her screams that wake them hours later. And he’s certain the noise is coming from himself, in the heartbeats between sleeping and waking, the only logical source.  
  
But he’s scrambled onto his feet on reflex even before understanding has fully formed.  
  
Mouth dry, he hovers, and she’s crying, really sobbing, her shoulders shaking, and there’s fear uncoiling heavy in his chest, smashing and surging, fear he’s not equipped to deal with, his breath skipping and his heart suddenly erratic, but he forces focus, tangles his fingers in the sheets because reaching out is still beyond him, because what if she doesn’t want to be touched at rest, in her nightmares.  
  
But he can’t leave her either, even as the thought of his own anchor unmoored claws through his existence as he understands it at present.  
  
“Shuri?” It falls from his lips somewhere between tremble and hiss, and her eyes fly open immediately.  
  
Reaching is beyond him, but his arms wrap around her as she buries herself in his chest, the tears still falling, and for a moment, he is beyond himself, he is bigger, solid, and if anyone hurt her...  
  
The violence of notion floods, searing, familiar, frightening but welcome all at once, and he fears and seeks it, and just wants to make the pain in her end.  
  
“He’s alive.” She whispers, and her body is small in his arms. “He’s alive.”  
  
“Yes.” The murmur presses into her hair where he’s tucked his face.   
  
Maybe, they all are.  
  
—  
  
He shifts his beads to a setting he’s never used, crept out to the river after she’s settled again. There’s uncertainty in him, but he’s sure it’s the right thing to do. If he gets kicked out of the country for impertinence, so be it.  
  
T’Challa’s voice sounds tired, in the dusky not yet morning, but only concerned.  
  
In an hour, he is there, and somehow, Bucky’s little hut has become a halfway house for royalty.  
  
“Your Majesty.” He says, and his tongue isn’t quite sure how to work, isn’t sure exactly how to speak to this man, to this King, who had hated him and hunted him and saved him in the space of days, and then there was sleep, darkness, and light, and now this.   
  
T’Challa’s smile is kind, a little too understanding, a brush of playful scold.  
  
“Sergeant Barnes.” Beneath point perfect courtesy there’s an undercurrent of amused challenge, should Bucky choose to accept it, maybe an invitation, of a sort, still unclear. 

Touche, he thinks with the ghost of a smile, with the barest quirk of lip, and drops his eyes to the ground, catches himself, and then raises them to the ceiling instead. Shuri hates when he slouches, when he lets himself curl up and over,  _ Up is always better than down _ , her voice is already a second echo in his mind. 

He stays outside the hut for some imperceptible amount of time, as the horizon brightens and the world begins to wake. And when he creeps back in, they are both asleep, T’Challa’s too big body tucked around Shuri’s on the too small bed, her face has eased into a smile, his arms are around her, and they both seem very young. 

He sits cross-legged on his bed as the first shadows appear on the floor, and wonders if Steve ever sleeps through the night. 

\--

“Would you like to test it?” She asks in a would be casual tone, dropping down to sit next to him in the shadow of a tree where he’s curled himself up, languid in the too hot heat, sweat still a fine sheen from a morning that alternated between goats and hay and over energized children. 

He squints at her through the brightness, she doesn’t look at him, and then she does.

“Your -” She hums in mock thought. “Steve, is coming. He could do it, perhaps.” 

“No.”

She nods as though she already knew. 

“Then I could -”

“No.”

She shakes her head as though to say,  _ My work is perfect, you would not hurt me. _ But he knows he can’t take that risk.

“T’Challa then.” Her lips curve in triumph and her smile is all teeth, she is meddling and conspiratorial and he thinks he loves her. “Your Steve trusts him, and he has proven your match, and you -.” She lets the words swirl around her lips because she’s gossipy and a royal brat sometimes, and he hopes he grows up to be just like her. “You are fond.” 

“We should test it.” He answers her opening play as though there had been nothing in between and she laughs, a clear crystal sound across the plain. 

Inside of him, it magnifies, sews a few more tares together again. 

\--

Russian on the smooth, rich voice, ice crystallizing around molten lava, sounds wrong, and on the strength of that alone maybe, he doesn’t think it will work. 

But the words sound and the panic starts, a pressure heavy in his chest, of pure terror, of horrific conditioned response which ebbs and growls and fights, but doesn’t build, though his panic does, he loses the words, somewhere between the third and the fourth, loses up from down, curls in on himself, each limb pulling back into his body one tense muscle and then the next, as though a creature ready to strike, and there are memories breaking in his head, over, and over, explosions of anguish, and what is breath? And what is blood? And what is existing at all? Maybe he’s crying, maybe he’s screaming. 

From somewhere, there’s a soft touch to his arm, a pull upwards, and dizzily, somehow, he is in a chair, and T’Challa is crouched next to it, peering up at him, so close to Shuri’s expression, but something wiser there, in a different way, a compassion built with experience neither of them wish on her. Sometimes, Bucky feels too young, too incredibly naive and hopelessly inexperienced to be in his own body, and sometimes, he feels too old to be allowed to exist at all. 

“It didn’t work.” It comes out small, maybe in wonder. Some unbearable kind of awe at the unimaginable alteration of his existence, as though he is not inside himself at all, as though he is somewhere very far away and this is all a manifestation of his mind, imploding at last. 

T’Challa’s lips curve up, a king kneeling at his feet.

“No.” He agrees, and a hand curves around his own, grounding.

\--

She braids his hair into elaborate creations as they watch movies he has missed in sleep and war. In truth, he’s sure, she’s working touch into his vocabulary, pushing him to accept it in a myriad of different ways. 

He likes this one though, the gentle scrape of her fingers, the occasional tug, an absurdly large ice cream sundae with two spoons and too much chocolate syrup, the kind of sprinkles which he likes best, because a discernment of sprinkles is the kind of knowledge which he is allowed to hold these days, and the movies themselves. Swelling music, and over abundance of tears, and the unbelievably ridiculous tales of romance that never end with dying, and ice, and filling each other with bullets and bruises. 

Those, she tells him, are not on the Bucky approved list.

He laughs at that and she watches him for a moment, something soft in her eyes, and sticks out her tongue when he asks if he has whipped cream on his face or something. A slight little bit of sarcasm, everything still in pilot testing. 

“Just admiring my handiwork.” She gives him with a cheeky grin, and he tries to match.

Tries to say. “It’s all natural.” And not waver on delivery. 

He lets her lean against him without question, wraps an arm around her shoulders, because she’s seeking something, and he’s proud of himself for even being able to tell that much. 

“Will you go?” The question comes eventually, because unlike him, she is incapable of keeping anything hidden, of not letting her thoughts sound into the universe. A notion ingrained in her entire existence that they are too important to be kept away if she has them, a notion she wants for him. “Your mind is clear, you are -” She considers her words carefully and they do not stream out in an endless chatter like they often do, come out one by one. “Perhaps closer to healed.” There’s a hint of something that conveys  _ not enough, not to leave _ but she would never say that to him. 

The silence between them stretches and, in truth, he isn’t sure. 

He doesn’t want to fight.

And there are still too many broken pieces. 

But. 

“I would make you an arm.” She says, quiet, and quieter, too low. “If you would go.” 

“I -” I love you. He wants to say, but the words get stuck in his throat.

She knows though, of course, as she always knows the truth buried in his bones, and wraps her arms around his chest.

“I love you too.” She murmurs, fearless that she has gotten it wrong. 

Always bold. 

\--

Steve comes on a quiet morning, the fragrance of flowers floating in the air, and Bucky knows the exact moment his presence mixes with that of the land. When the alteration of the universe completes itself. 

Wakanda is always light and the sun is always shining, but everything in Bucky brightens, burns hotter, brushes sharper. The entirety of his universe centering to a point. 

Steve’s hair is long and he has a beard, and he’s changed since Bucky lost him, since Bucky left him, there’s something worn across his cheeks, something more worn, and maybe closer to the scrappy schoolyard boy that Bucky has always loved. He’s been surviving more than thriving, but his eyes are bright, and they brighten again when they land on him. 

“Well, look what the goats dragged in.” He offers lamely, and Steve’s arms are around him. 

It begins as a quiet morning, but the hug stretches long into afternoon. 

\--

He is thankful to have recovered some semblance of touch, to be able to tuck himself to the living breathing body to his right, and not try to flinch away. There’s a lot he’s still limited to, but leaning, pressed against each other shoulder to waist is perfectly acceptable, and he’s starving for it. 

Steve laughs, low and surprised, when he sees the little hut, the Wakandan blankets, the goats which meander into the house because they are poorly behaved and Bucky doesn’t have the heart to stop them, ditto for the children. 

“You’re happy here, Buck?” It’s a sincere question, but there’s a slight undercurrent of something like sadness below, faint and flickering, but loud, the barest clang of a hope dying. 

“Yeah.” He gives back just as intently, with an identically different ache. “I am.”

The land is his home now, and he’s grounded in it, but Steve is his home equally, and there is no way, he’s starting to understand, to have both overlap entirely. 

\--

Shuri comes, to spy, Bucky knows, and there is a frisson of tension immediately as they look at one another, size up their stakes and claims, but then T’Challa comes out behind her, and Steve’s smile breaks broadly, a certain kind of gentle giant understanding passing silently between them. 

T’Challa smiles back, and there’s maybe something a little shy about it. 

Shuri rolls her eyes, but Bucky knows she’s pleased, it exudes from her in every way she can’t hide.

“Wakanda is very welcoming.” She tells Steve, stepping right up boldly. “A great place to  _ stay a while. _ ” 

In truth, Bucky doesn’t mind her manipulations, because their goals are twinned, and she’s too smart to try for a direct assault. In her mind it is simple, she doesn’t want Bucky to leave, Bucky wants Steve, so Steve should stay. 

It’s a convincing case, and she’s very clever, but there’s an endless battle in Steve’s heart, a constant need to fight and save that Steve feels for an entire world, for a whole universe, a need to set right that Bucky has only ever felt for Steve. It’s the only argument he doesn’t win automatically for the other. 

“Shuri.” T’Challa warns and she grins back at him, but her eyes are on Bucky. 

She winks,  _ we’ll get him _ . 

But maybe he has better arms dealers, these days. 

\--

They sit outside, by the lake, and Steve splashes water all over him and laughter cracks fissures across his face. Steve watches him, eyes wet with something more than lakewater, hopelessly, unbearably devoted, and Bucky loves him. He loves him so much more than he could ever put into words.

They slip into the water, give sun to their tired, battle worn, scarred up bodies, and Steve’s eyes never leave him, as blue as the sky, and bluer, his hair has lightened again too, with more time spent here, away from the dust and shadows he emerged from.

_ Stay with me. _ Dances on both of their tongues. 

But instead Steve says. “Nat and Sam, they found something, I think I gotta -” Bluer than his memories of the ocean, Bucky thinks, bluer than the bluest thing on this earth. “I think I gotta go back.” 

The last syllables are soft, lingering. Bucky moves himself closer, lets the barest brush of touch come between them. Though their skin is wet, its searing, always searing, a bright conflagration of connection. 

He nods, wants to look away, but doesn’t, is too caught up for that. 

“I’ll miss you.” The words are more shape than sound, caught breathless in the unhappiness filling the spaces where air should go in his lungs. The already creeping exhaustion of loneliness. 

The kiss that comes inevitable, the result of planets crashing, orbits colliding, is bittersweet, and Steve’s hands tangle up in his hair, press down along his spine, find the shape of him where he can’t ever find it himself.

\--

Despondency comes, because emotional upheaval is still a novelty to the circuits of his mind, and they short out quickly, anguished depression a more familiar path for them to take.

But Shuri comes on its heels, and she is a different kind of light to the one disappeared again for now. 

“Next time.” She tuts shaking her head, her fingers brushing his hair back where he’s curved himself into a ball in bed, sweats and a hoodie instead of wakandan blankets. “We will simply lock him in a room, and then, then he will no choice but to remain.” 

There’s a certain huff in her tone, but she doesn’t press too hard, because he’s here, and he’s stayed and in a way, that is a little victory for her. He has to make a mental note to stop loving competitive hot-heads. 

She doesn’t force him out of bed though, just perches on the edge and fills the emptiness with sound. 

\--

He’s leaned against Steve, and pleased, really, and Steve is grinning, because Bucky is, and T’Challa is shaking his head. 

“Are you satisfied yet, Shuri?” He’s fond, but exasperated on Steve’s other side, an arm thrown around broad shoulders, fingers just skimming Bucky’s arm, a faint almost touch. There’s mirth between all of them in the air, a pleasant uproarious peace, glad to be together, glad to find each other. 

“Quiet brother.” Shuri says from behind her phone, which is not really a phone, a thing he now mostly understands, but a bizarre contraption of technology beyond his comprehension. “If you interrupt my focus, the light will be all wrong, and I will have to begin again.” 

Her smile is impish. 

“I would like to remember these moments.”

And they are, Bucky thinks, good moments to keep. 


End file.
